Analysis and synthesis

I’ll start with some definitions, from Dictionary.com:

• synthesis: the combining of the constituent elements of separate material or abstract entities into a single or unified entity;
• analysis: the separating of any material or abstract entity into its constituent elements.

In order to carry out a synthesis, you must start with the component parts.  Otherwise there is no way to proceed.

In order to perform analysis, you must start with some sort of methods for separating into parts.

In recent posts, I have been discussing the idea of carving up the world.  That more or less fits the definition of analysis.

My starting assumption, based on what I know about biology, is that an organism starts its life without much knowledge of what exists in the world, but with some innate abilities (methods).  So it would seem that analysis, rather than synthesis, should be the basis of learning how to cope in the world.

An example

As a child, maybe at around 12 years of age, I remember taking my bicycle completely apart.  And then I reassembled it.  That would be an example of analysis, followed by a synthesis.

Meaning and reference

I take the view that meaning is subjective.

Many people argue that meaning is objective.  Putnam, in effect, was arguing that in his “The meaning of meaning.”  But it has seemed to me that Putnam’s argument was really about reference rather than about meaning.

In this post I shall discuss both meaning an reference.  And I shall attempt to relate them to my posts about carving up the world.

Intension and extension

It is common to discuss meaning related topics in terms of extension and intension.  The extension of a word is the set of things that it can refer.  So the extension of “cat” would be the set of all cats.  The term “intension” is supposed to be something internal, related to the word.  The intension of “cat” might consist of all properties that characterize cats.

Sharing concepts with the culture

In my previous post, I discussed carving up the world.  The idea is that we carve the world and give names to some of the parts into which we carve.  Those named parts become the concepts that are part of the true statements we make about the world.

In an earlier post, I indicated that how we carve up the world needs to be a social convention.  And the naming that we use also needs to be a social convention.  That these are social conventions is what allows us to communicate with one another.

In this post, I will be discussing how these social conventions can be established.

The culture

By the culture we mean, roughly speaking, the society and the social practices of people within that society.

We cannot share  things with the culture until there is a culture.  Picture the problem for young child.  She needs to learn how to carve up the world in order to fill her world with details.  So the need to carve up the world starts before the child has much of a world.  In particular, the child needs to start carving up the world before she can become aware that she is part of a society.  In other words, the carving up must begin without access to any carving conventions from the culture.  The child must initiate carving by herself, and not wait until she learns what are the social conventions.

Carving up the world

It is said that we carve up the world at its seams.  I doubt that there are any seams.  We carve up the world in ways that are easy enough and that we find useful.  But those requirements — that it be easy enough and that it be useful — underdetermine how the world is to be carved.  So it is a matter of pragmatic decision making.

As we saw in my last post, carving up the world is what gives us the entities that we can talk about and is what allows us to say true things about the world.

I should say at the outset, that carving up the world isn’t an entirely conscious and deliberate activity.  Much of the work is done behind the scenes by our perceptual systems.  So, in part, this post is related to how perception works.  So when I talk about us carving up the world, I am not restricting this to conscious activity.

Why it is hard

We cannot just look around and see what are good ways of carving up the world.  To be able to look around and see, then what you are looking at has to have a lot of detail.  But the detail that we see gets there because of how we carve up the world.  So we cannot presuppose that it is available before we do any carving.